Monday, August 17, 2009

As the Walking With Dinosaurs show tours the UK this month, we asked biologist John Hutchinson, an expert on dinosaur locomotion at the Royal Veterinary College in North Mymms, near London, to comment on the realism of the show's life-size automatons (see video).

Hutchinson's team works out how dinosaurs moved. A recent collaboration with Eureka Exhibits, a company that specialises in travelling exhibits for museums, is called Be The Dinosaur: an ultra-realistic simulation using high-definition screens based on what we know of the environment in which Tyrannosaurus rex lived. By navigating the virtual world, users can experience how it might have felt to be a T. rex.

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